


Return to Glory

by thatbluenote



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Brunnhilde | Valkyrie (Marvel), Bisexual Loki (Marvel), Brunnhilde's girlfriend saved her from Hela look it up, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams and Nightmares, Enemies to Lovers, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hela and Thor are only mentioned, Interstitial, Pining, Thor: Ragnarok (2017) Post-Credits Scene, Wet Dream, be the soft trash you wish to see in the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 01:54:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14298207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbluenote/pseuds/thatbluenote
Summary: Brunnhilde finds the last case of liquor on the ship and just wants to drink away everything she can't forget.It's something a little stronger than liquor, though.Loki has something to say about her pity party, and then things get weird.





	Return to Glory

**Author's Note:**

> Draumskrok, Old Norse (n.): dreams that are random and meaningless. Lit. “dream-nonsense.” https://norse-mythology.org/dreams/
> 
> Sumbl, Old Norse (n.): ritualistic drinking to bring about ecstasy. https://norse-mythology.org/tales/the-mead-of-poetry/ 
> 
> Draumsumbl, Asgardian (n.): liquor of unknown origin (Nine Realms, source unidentified) known to induce ecstatic dreams.

Everyone recognizes the sound of her boots along the metal grates of the freight deck that first day. The only Asgardian with dried blood still caked on her armor walks in with fire in her eyes, and the little crowd parts nervously around her. Korg looks up affably at her approach.

“Oh, hey man. Welcome to Inventory Club. Who knew the revolution would require so much paper pushing, but there you go. Shoulda learned my lesson on that one the first time around. You here to help sort out these pallets?”

She strides past Korg and his flimsy clipboard. Glares up at the towering jumble of supplies and vaults up a level of crates, then another, clambering over a dusty stack of fuel cell housings.

Brunnhilde’s knife slashes once, twice, at the banding around a crate. Opens it and spares a look that might be a smile. Unlabeled, but that’s never stopped her before.

She hauls out the box and balances it easily on her shoulder with one hand before leaping the fifteen-foot drop back down to the deck.

Her boots land with a heavy, ringing impact, far louder than the sudden outbursts of surprise from those standing nearby. Sheathes her knife with a satisfied sigh.

“Oh, found something good, then? We’ll start with whatever that is. I’m supposed to mark everything down on this little list I got,” Korg says, but Brunnhilde turns to leave. No one is willing to utter a word.

“I’ll just...uh…” He squints at a code on the side of her box as she sweeps past. “Shoot. Anyone catch what that said? Drum sand? No--- _dram_ something. Sunder or sumble maybe, I’m not up on my binary languages.”

She disappears into the corridor without a word or a backward glance.

“Well, what’s a few supplies among friends, eh? It’s just the survival of the Asgardians at stake here, I’m sure we won’t need that--”

“Draumsumbl,” a man whispers reverently.

“Good. I’ll just mark it down here as…Miscellaneous.”

*

She doesn’t want to take off the armor to clean it. Doesn’t care to touch it, this last little evidence of home. Whatever that means.

On the battle of the bridge, she kept it all at bay, whatever anger wanted to dredge up and grief wanted to sift its fingers through, everything Loki had pulled out of her memory of the time _before_. Of how the fight against Hela’s reign had ended the first time, or should have, and her flight from her fallen shield-sisters. Of all of them, together, sun-bright armor against dark sky, riding together for the last time.

And of _her_. Always her. Her golden braids as she fell to Hela’s blade, right before Brunnhilde’s eyes. The Valkyries are dead, but _her_ death is the wolf in whose mouth Brunnhilde is caught, awake or asleep.

Now after Asgard, after Hela falls and they escape, none of it fades. Aboard the ship, the memory rises in her like bile. Like blood in a killing wound.

She merely guessed the freight deck would offer her something; with something that feels nothing like satisfaction, she takes it (the very last case of it on this whole stupid ship of heroes and fools, she suspects) to the coldest, most abandoned and foul-smelling corner of the ship to drink in peace. To forget.

To wait, of course, for Loki.

 

*

 

When the god reveals himself, one clear glass bottle already lies empty next to her, easy to swing and shatter as she vaults up, pinning Loki to the wall by his neck. The shards gleam dully in the ship’s fitful light, but Loki’s eyes fairly glitter at her in the dark. 

“Still brooding, I see.”

She grips the tunic at his shoulder tighter in her fist and presses closer, the jagged edges touching his pale skin, enough to draw four tiny drops of blood. “Stop following me.”

“Stop hoarding supplies.”

“Is that all you’re after? Liquor? Fight me for it.” Brunnhilde bares her teeth in a mirthless grin, every muscle primed for it. “Or has your brother got you tamed now?”

That gets through. His arm lashes sideways. Before she can pivot out of the way, he hurls the bottle out of her grip. It shatters against the wall. Loki frees himself from her forearm with one fluid step before his boot connects with her solar plexus. The Valkyrie doubles over to gasp in a breath only to explode forward in rage, her full weight bearing him down to the floor grates in a heap. It’s over in one brutal second.

Brunnhilde kneels astride Loki’s torso, triumphant. Disgusted. “Thor has tamed you. You’re pulling your punches.”

Bored now, she stands up and returns to the half-finished bottle wedged in the corner where two access panels join.

Loki rolls forward and stands up, but remains silent, waiting. Eyeing her chosen hiding place. This abandoned stretch of utility corridor stinks of fuel solvent and corroding metal. He sneers with disgust.

She raises the bottle, amber liquid sloshing inelegantly in a mocking toast. Drains another half of it. Brunnhilde keeps her eyes open, unblinking, watching him watching her the whole time she drinks it down.

“He hasn’t... _tamed_ me.” A pause, his jaw working. “My brother has merely requested that I refrain from losing any more of Asgard than we have already.”

She tips it up further, swallowing smoothly. Further. She finishes it and drops the bottle where she stands. Neither of them flinches at the sound. The shattered bits make a discordant arpeggio dropping through the grates and scattering among the metal conduit snaking below. “He didn’t say anything like that to me,” Brunnhilde says with a wicked smile.

Loki lets out an amused huff, scoffing.

“Oh, you don’t think I could kill you?” She sits down next to her crate and pulls out another gleaming bottle.

“Keep drinking, Valkyrie,” he says dismissively.

“I’ve killed on more. This is just your little gift to me,” she says placidly, patting the top of the little crate.

“My...gift?”

“Your apology,” she amends. Her teeth crack the seal of the bottle and she tosses the cap into the shadows next to her. More trash through the gratings.

“What should I apologize for? Returning you to your former glory?”

“My...glory...” That word.

Another mouthful of the amber, strong and strange. The burn inside is almost enough. “Is that what you call it?” Tips up the bottle again. More. Stemming the tide and teeth of memories. No _glory_. A kind of blur begins to haze over everything, and she thinks fondly of all the Sakaaran distillers and bootleggers she’ll never have to bribe again. “Sakaar was perfectly--”

“Don’t tell me an Asgardian, a Valkyrie, preferred that stinking ash heap of a planet.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, God of Lies.” Her voice drawls now, slowing; everything gone golden, echoing, sibilant. “Every worthless day was bliss compared to what you pulled outta my head. Bliss.”

Loki looks at her with dawning comprehension and fury. “What I pulled out of your...You _idiot_. Look where it got you. What we all achieved! Hela defeated. Asgard fallen, but her people redeemed.” Something kindles in his eyes as he gestures to the ship around them, but it dims as he focuses again on the slumped form before him. “Yet here I find you. Asgard’s last shield maiden. Drinking in darkness…” he pauses, his green eyes fixed pitilessly on hers, “fouling the armor you are no longer worthy to bear.”

She feels his words swim in her blood, rousing something, but every spark of defiance and fury and revenge is dimmed by shame. Memory rises, blood and hunger. The wolf has her in its mouth.

If the howl of her grief surprises him, he hides it well.

 

*

 

The golden singing of the ship, of everything around them, was definitely not there when she started drinking; some indefinable time has passed and the gold haze is so lulling she does not examine time too closely. Loki is laughing, a sound with a song in it. She tilts her head to listen, tips the bottle up before passing it to him. “I swear I never thought of it like that…” A smile curls over her, this feeling like a giddy wave. They are helpless with laughter, breathless.

 _Grief beyond anything, grief that shook her ragged, spat her out, soul-empty and aching._ When had they lain down here, cloaks folded beneath their heads? The trickster himself a languid tangle, a folded paper swan of a man, no more a threat than she is. They are magnificently, toweringly intoxicated now, golden with stupor. With something.

_Tell me about her._

_Have you ever been in love? His eyes crackling with knowledge._ The golden singing is in her blood so strong it shines as bright as Valhalla, bright as…

When had he unraveled Brunnhilde’s hair? _Her hair. It shone. Each braid a rope of fire I would slay thousands to protect._ Her loosened crown plait trails around her, his fingers stroking through the tendrils idly. Warmed like a cat in the sunbeam of all this strange golden glowingness everywhere around.

Loki’s eyes fall upon her and the laughter dancing there glimmers just this side of hysterical -- hadn’t those eyes filled with darker knowing moments ago? Or hours, perhaps. _Her kiss a flame, a shield around us. Daughter of Glory. Heidr-dyrd,_ ah gods, _Maerrun._ Or was that before. It tangled together and she didn’t care to understand its weaving. The golden gleam upon the green-eyed god, too. _I see her in you. I see all of them._

“If Thor ever…” Loki dissolves into fits of laughter again, dropping the bottle in his hands.

A halo of gold follows his limbs, she sees it trace his movements, trace everything. _I cannot stop seeing them. Her._ The dimness dancing with the gold of the singing amber liquor.

In the grace of slowed time, she catches the bottle. _Should you?_

Brunnhilde loses the thread of what she wanted to fight him for, before the golden tide. _This is the only silence I have._ She drains the bottle and the case is empty, now. _Then it’s the last silence you’ll get for a long time, Valkyrie. One perfect glass bottle, its amber tipping as she tosses it easily through the air, end over end._ It’s gone but it sings loud in her blood and she lets it carry her, swimming into it.

Lets Loki convince her there is something better than this stinking metal corridor. _His mouth wet with the golden liquor, he understands now. This is -- what does it matter?_ Lets everything braid together in the ecstatic gold of night.

Lets him steer her, his glamor around them. A shower (water glowing, almost as golden as...), a berth, a clean tunic so she can finally lay aside the bloodied armor and look away from its terrible truth, everything that has fallen (long ago, and yesterday, and in between) and cannot be brought back.

Golden, but emptied, they sleep.

 

*

 

Her dream is the world before the wolf of memory bared its teeth: Asgard as it was, the realm of her youth. The Valkyries undefeated, her shield-sisters, star-bright battalion of victory. The gleam of armor, swords sharp and sweet as legend.

In the dream, her footfalls pass the Hall of the Shield Maidens after nightfall, fire flickering in the great hearth, the raucous noise of the feast. The song of her own blood singing _home_.

The dream is seconds, is life-long; _her_. Glory. Every flashing, mercurial second by her side. Sparring, spears clashing on horseback. Her sun-bright braids arcing through the hot air. The one who, wild-blooded, catches her by the hand in the dusk of the night hall. The softness of her like nothing else, her mouth--

Fades. She wakes, aching and breathless with the memory.

There is a moment when she reaches for the dagger still sheathed at her thigh. She would kill to reclaim the dream.

Loki too lies awake but motionless, curled behind her in the dim, unremarkable sleeping berth. They both dreamed under the golden blur of this night.

She stills, remembering. The strange song of the liquor has fled, but fire curls in her limbs from the dream. So close she can taste it.

Loki breathes shallow, pained. Returned from the far shore of his own dream. His silence like a dark star, heavy.

She opens her lips to speak of it, but desire hovers too close to the surface. Her pulse still races with it. The bright, terrible dream. _Her_.

He listens.

Loki has seen her caught in the teeth of memory and sundered by it. Understands now, perhaps. Almost.

Hilde cannot bear the feeling of _almost_. She will leave. Now.

But his hand clenches heavy on her hip, and he draws her back against his chest. His whisper snarls only, “ _Stay,_ ” as the sudden grind of his hips against hers lights a heat between her legs.

Perhaps it’s his warmth that stops her, too. Only Asgardian blood burns like this.

His voice twists maddeningly in her ear. “I know you dreamt of her. I dreamt of...” Turning her head just a little, she sees his eyelids fall shut. Unable to let it go, to say it.

“Him,” she breathes, her lips ghosting nearer his skin. His slow shudder stokes the fire between them, and when his eyes open they dance with a fickle, lust-drunk desire. He raises the hand from her hip to trace the outline of her lips and her breath turns shallow. They are not themselves to each other.

In her ear, his voice shades darker, each sound breaking her a little. She tilts her head just enough to show him she craves that whisper. His hand slips under her tunic, up the bare skin of her side, and she only wants more. Eyes closed, she pushes back into him, barely stifling a needful moan.

It’s what he wants to hear. Loki’s mouth makes another liquid, filthy sound when his hand closes over her nipple, rolls it between his fingers, and as she pushes into his hand for more, he pulls her nipple hard enough to make her gasp in pleasure. Plays her like music.

He pulls her close, rolling onto his back so she is pulled half onto his torso. His long fingers have pulled her trembling thighs apart. He wants to spread her like that, teasing with nothing more than pressure at the apex of her legs as their hips circle, seeking friction. She finally grasps his hand and draws those fingers into her wet mouth, sucking.

He groans to feel that delicious suction and she snakes her hand down between them to feel the hard length of him. “Touch me,” she gasps, and his still-wet fingers slide out of her mouth, down the soft plane of her stomach to what she craves. His fingertips tease, stroking, until she grasps his cock and fingers the sensitive vein underneath, maddening, so that he understands. _Harder_.

She is wet, so wet from the dream; his fingers spread that wetness everywhere, a delirium enough to make her breathless with need. His words in her ear so filthy she doesn’t care they’re not for her. Better this way.

“More,” she gasps. “Like this,” joining her fingers with his and guiding him to the right place and friction, just to the side of her clit, and he makes her hips buck with the intensity of his dedication to it only moments later. He has her splayed on top of him, exposed, writhing, his other hand grabbing a fistful of hair to pull her head up and back as she hisses _yes, yes, yes._

She reaches behind her to grasp his cock in her calloused hand, stroking her hand up and around the head to gather the drops waiting there. Feels the girth of him pulsing, straining. Pumps up and down, slickly fast. “Hilde...I--” he moans. “ _Fuck_.”

Her hips circling, pushing up to meet his fingers, faster and faster now, her fingers encircle his cock tightly, perfectly. Insistent, greedy for it. “You want to come, Loki?” she breathes, and his spine arches beneath her, ecstatic but holding back.

He’s at the edge, cock swollen, sliding and slick, but he grits out, “Not--yet--”

Both of his arms reach around her waist now, so the fingertips of one hand sliding on that perfect spot are joined by the push of one finger, then two, inside her, stretching. _Ah_! Three fingers, curling and _pulling_. Her hips push, bucking. Loki makes a feral noise near her ear again when she twists her slick hand around him tightly and it’s nearly enough. “Again,” she begs.

Pushed to the brink, caught between his perfect, filthy fingers, she hears him in her ear, silk whispering over gravel, “Come for me, _Valkyrie_.”

It draws up, _bursts_. Bright blur, waves of ecstasy. Pushing into his fingers again and again. More. Feels his cock swell and twitch in her hand as he comes with a strangled shout. His hips jerking and seed spilling hotly on them both. The pleasure in her is not done, her legs clamp together to ride it, prolong it, and as it slowly ebbs, breath returns to her and she strokes him up and down, the slickness gone languid.

Silenced, they breathe.

The green-eyed god and his strange gifts. The Valkyrie and her memories. No more ecstasy but this.

Brunnhilde turns just enough to land face-down in the pillow, and she sleeps. Dreamless now. Neither wolves nor glory.

**Author's Note:**

> “Heidr-dyrd...Maerrun”
> 
> Old Asgardian, lit. “bright-glory...glorious” or “Glory the glory-bright” in the style of Old Norse saga epithets.  
> http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/language/English-Old_Norse.pdf
> 
> (Author begs you to please pretend some of the D letters are actually Eth as they should be, and that others appear with their proper diacritical marks.)


End file.
